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We are very pleased that we can release our report on the LIL-DEM project. This report is based on our initial examination of the data from a Scotland-wide online survey of community councillors. Please click the graphic on the left to access the report.

Over the next few weeks, we will explore some of the issues raised in this report, but for now we want to thank the 1300 community councillors who responded to the survey, the community councillors who helped publicise it, and the people who helped us refine the questions. (These include Improvement Service staff, colleagues here at Edinburgh Napier University’s Centre for Social Informatics, and some Edinburgh community councillors.)

We are very pleased to say that we will soon start a new project. This project, called More Information Literacy for Democratic Engagement, will delve deeper into the data gathered in the IL-DEM project. It will run from the end of September to December 2017. We thank Edinburgh Napier University’s Research and Innovation Office for funding this project.

We are delighted to welcome Lyndsey Jenkins to this project. Her statistics expertise will greatly enhance our data-exploration and hence the outcomes from this project.

Our i3 presentation will cover a range of findings including the means by which community councillors learn about their roles, and how they discover and share information about local issues. These results derive from our investigations based on SCONUL’s 7-pillars model of information literacy (PDF).

We have reported practical aspects of our results in our Stakeholder Report for the IL-DEM project. At I3 we look forward to reporting the results in an academic context. We also plan to extend the I3 presentation as a full journal article for submission to the Journal of Library and Information Science.

We’ve also learnt that our abstract on our use of Activity Theory as a data-analysis tool has been accepted for the 2017 European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL). This conference takes place in St Malo, France in September. It is also our intention to develop this second conference paper into a more substantial output. We’ll blog details of this in due course.

The online survey for the second Information Literacy for Democratic Engagement project has been running for about three weeks now. We intend to keep it live for another week, so we can’t say anything about what community councillors have told us – yet! However, we can say there are some interesting patterns in how people tackled the survey.

As of Saturday (25th March) evening, 747 people had completed the survey. We want as many people as possible to take the survey, so if you’re a community councillor who hasn’t taken the survey yet, please click here. It may be slightly complex to complete all questions but it really should only take about 15 minutes, and you’ll be contributing to a major piece of work contributing to knowledge of practical ways to support community council work. If you’re not a community councillor, please pass on this link to any you know: https://survey.napier.ac.uk/n/LILDEM.aspx. Continue reading →

In previous research, we have observed the poor record of online engagement of community councils in Scotland, though I doubt this is issue is restricted only to this context. With some notable exceptions, Community Council online presences are characterised by low activity. Only around a quarter are actively online whether on Facebook or web, and even when there are high levels of primary postings, there is low secondary engagement in the form of comments or responses, never mind sustained online debate.

This has been characterised as “lurking”.

The question I am exploring at the moment is:

To what extent is a passive audience (lurking) an issue to community representatives when they are posting material online?

One question this raises is why so few citizens participate online. This has been one theme of (e-participation) research into online democratic processes since the field began at the start of the millennium. There has…